1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to network scheduling and more particularly to optimizing throughput, overhead and performance in relay-assisted wireless networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been an increasing demand to provide ubiquitous mobile access for a multitude of services ranging from conventional data to real-time streaming applications. To meet such requirements, the existing cellular systems need to be enhanced to provide improved data rates and connectivity. Adding less sophisticated and less expensive “relay” stations (RS) to a network helps improve the throughput and coverage in the network.
Introduction of relays transforms a network into a two-hop network, which is not as complex as a multi-hop network but at the same time not as straight-forward as a cellular network, thereby allowing for unique optimizations. Such two-hop networks not only provide multi-user and channel diversity (available in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems) but also provide spatial reuse across relay and access links due to the introduction of relays. However, the exploitation of these diversities and spatial reuse at a base station (BS) require significant amount of feedback overhead on the relay links, thereby bringing down the capacity of the relay links, which already form a bottleneck.
Prior art systems leverage only the diversity aspects of these networks, and do not exploit spatial reuse. In addition, the prior art does not focus on reducing feedback overhead on the relay links, which is especially high in the presence of multiple channels given that the relay links already form a bottleneck.